How Congress won the war in the gulf.

• Author: Boo, Katherine
• Position: Implementing the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act in the Persian Gulf War

On January 20, 1991, as George Bush informed the nation in his State of the Union address that our military would prevail in the Gulf war, the TV cameras trained in on four particularly solemn members of the audience: the military's service chiefs, all gravity and ribbon. The president's assurances ride on these shoulders, the cameras seemed to coo. At first, that thought seemed comforting. Then it seemed absolutely astounding.

What the hell are these guys doing gussied up in the president's claque? There's a war on, for God's sake. Shouldn't they be rumpled and ready in the Pentagon war room, wired on coffee, blinded by VDTs, pinpointing enemy strongholds in the desert?

Not anymore, they shouldn't--and, mercifully, they can't. During the Gulf war, for the first time, the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines had been effectively banished from the prosecution of a major war, thanks to a little-appreciated, five-year-old law called the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act. On this night, as 2,600 air sorties obliterated column after column of Iraqi tanks, the chiefs may well have been grateful that they had something interesting to do with their time.

You've probably never heard of it, and the Pentagon's probably glad you haven't, but Goldwater-Nichols helped ensure that this war had less interservice infighting, less deadly bureaucracy, fewer needless casualties, and more military cohesion than any major operation in decades. Bitterly opposed by the Department of Defense, condemned as "unpatriotic" by most service chiefs, virtually ignored by the press (its passage earned four paragraphs on a back page of The New York Times), this technocratic reform measure shifted control of military operations from four competing Washington bureaucracies--the freewheeling services--to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and a single, independent field commander. If the details of Goldwater-Nichols are arcane, their effects were gloriously apparent in the Gulf. For the first time in 45 years, Congress--Congress--managed to neutralize parochial interests and increase strategic efficiency in one of the most entrenched and self-serving bureaucracies in America.

Armed and dangerous

Among military men, there's a word for people who look beyond their own particular service to the needs of the broader military: "purple"--a blend of military colors. At the Pentagon, it isn't always a compliment. While other militaries--British, Canadian, Israeli, German--have long assigned priority to interservice cooperation, American warfare since the Spanish-American war, when the Navy and Army squabbled all the way to Santiago, has been marked by a startling degree of service autonomy. In Korea in 1953, the Air Force virtually abandoned a Marine division encircled by a mass of Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir; the terrified Americans escaped only after Marine pilots subverted Air Force commanders and came to their aid. In Vietnam, the services ran five autonomous air wars and only one major joint operation. During the invasion of Grenada, commander James Metcalf--the Schwarzkopf of the Carribean--spent most of the conflict tied up on the phone, pleading with the Army and Navy to, hey, help me out a little.

That sort of military free-agency was precisely what the creation of a permanent JCS in 1947 was supposed to remedy: Four or five high officers appointed by their individual services would meet weekly to synthesize service views and mitigate bias before presenting military advice to the president. The chairmanship would rotate regularly--fairly--among the chiefs. But in creating an institution intended to promote purple, Congress simultaneously ensured the JCS's powerlessness by refusing its chairman decisionmaking power and leaving his appointment--and thus his loyalty--to his service. The result: a JCS that for decades transformed the execution of war into an all-service spoils system, topped by fractured, competing chains of command. In his autobiography, five-star General Omar Bradley looked back on a career of wars, international crises, and run-ins with Patton and MacArthur and located his life's most frustrating moments in chairing the power struggles that passed for meetings of the JCS.

Goldwater-Nichol's intent--and its stunning accomplishment--was to drain the military's bureaucractic swamp. Today, the service chiefs direct the training, organizing, and equipping of their men--the management side. When it comes to fighting, they step back and let a unified commander in the field, advised by a newly empowered JCS chair, run the show: a simple idea with critical strategic ramifications.

By moving the strategizing out of the four service bureaucracies to central command posts in Washington and the field, the new system gave the president, for the first time since 1947, confidence that the military operations suggested by the JCS chairman, Colin Powell, were not a political compromise but a strategy. Correspondingly, unified commander Norman Schwarzkopf had the unique freedom in the field to use the services, not "equitably," but sensibly. A career Army man, Schwarzkopf could fend off pressure from his own service and run the war almost exclusively from the air. Powell could set the timing of that air war over the vehement objections of the Air Force chief of staff. And together, under extreme heat, they could deny the amphibious landing coveted by the Marines--a glamorous enterprise that might have left thousands dead.

Still, Goldwater-Nichols's greatest contribution was not what it prevented, but what it promoted: four services that worked better together than they had at any time in the past 45 years. The execution was far from perfect--23 percent of American fatalities were caused by friendly fire, an indicator of the coordinating work that remains--but the new power structure allowed, with a minimum of memos and meetings, the decisive execution of an exceedingly complex operation. "Goldwater-Nichols wasn't just a factor," says Lawrence Korb of The Brookings Institution, who has studied military operations in and out of the Pentagon for the past 20 years. "It was one of the primary contributing factors to our success."

There is no little irony in talking of "success" in the Gulf, of course. Saddam is still in power, Kuwait is vindictive as well as devastated, and 100,000 Iraqis are still quite dead. But...